The photographer and political activist Miklós Klaus Rózsa (*1954) was kept under surveillance for years by the Swiss Federal Office of Police, the Cantonal police, and the municipal police of Zurich. His photographs as well as the State Protection files compiled on him from 1971 – 1989 form the basis for the book. Christof Nüssli and Christoph Oeschger juxtapose the text produced by the state and the images produced by the monitored person. The collage of these sources produces new images that reveal the history of a politically agitated time in Switzerland. The two lines of narration could not be more antithetic: On the one hand are the images by Rózsa which document the events from the midst of the agitation, the Zurich youth movement of the 1980s. On the other hand the surveillance files demonstrate the distanced and often uncomprehending gaze of the police observing the occurrences. The montage brings the conflict between Rózsa’s images and the State Security texts to light. Observation and counter-observation clash. The book will be published in cooperation with cpress, Zurich.

Published for “Il Piedistallo Vuoto – Fantasmi dall’Est Europa / The Empty Pedestal – Ghosts from Eastern Europe” – presented at the Museo Civico Archeologico in Bologna from January 24 to March 16 and organized by Arte Fiera – this book accompanies a project that traces recent developments in the art scene of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. On view are a hundred works (from leading Italian private art collections) by over forty artists, ranging from members of the younger generation, such as Petrit Halilaj, Gintaras Didžiapetris and Evgeny Antufiev, to recognized masters like Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Marina Abramović, and Miroslav Tichý. “None of these so-called archeologists”, writes exhibition curator Marco Scotini, “is practicing an art of ruins: they all act upon time but also ‘against’ time, in favor of a time to come. Neither do they aim to predict anything. All they do is allow the unknown knocking on the door to enter”. Alongside a compendium of images, the book presents a selection of essays by philosophers, art critics and curators that illustrate and comment on certain key concepts examined in the show, including the notions of “East” and “West”, and of “democracy”, “struggle”, “History”, and “site-specificity”.

cheap method edition offers a collection of working material issues. the aim is to open up specific methodologies, which are the basis for the creation of performative work. It is not about documentation, it is about starting a discourse on performative praxis, about the approaches, the material, the historical and political contexts and transportation, as well as the (artistic) decisions, the specific knowledge and experiences which are resembled in different working processes. cheap method edition will publish examples to create a discourse on fading performative works. cheap method edition combines artistic research with scientific and experiential knowledge, connects both in thematic issues to open up bigger contexts which can be re-used, re-worked and re-discussed and compared.

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struggling bodies
in capitalist societies
(democracies)

a publication series of political hybrids

03 editorial by claudia bosse
SELF-SUBVERSION AND ASCETICISM

08 gerald siegmund: to be or not to be:
towards a theatre of dis-identification
or the body as supplement

20 elke van campenhout: food and hunger

26 dialogue: gerald siegmund,
elke van campenhout, and others
THE BODY AND ITS CONSTRUCTIONS
BETWEEN SEXUAL AND POLITICAL
NORMATIVES

40 marina gržinić: struggling with the
performative body in the garbage dump
of history

54 dialogue: marina gržinić,
gerald siegmund, hrvoje jurić and others

62 snapshots of BOXEN,
performance by günther auer
THE BODY AS THE PLACE OF THE
POLITICAL

The book Libya: Inch by Inch, House by House, Alley by Alley is part of a series of publications about nations at war, or in crisis; conceived by Giovanna Silva, they tell the stories of different countries through photographs of their multifaceted landscapes. In the case of Libya, Silva has attempted to outline the architectural structures built by Muammar al-Gaddafi’s regime that were demolished during the recent revolution. Her journey started from Benghazi—the first epicenter of the revolt, as a city that had always been hostile to Colonel Gaddafi—and culminated in Tripoli, inside the bunker-barrack of Gaddafi’s residence. In this construction and de-construction of Gaddafi’s personality, Silva creates a parallel narrative relying on archival pictures she has collected over the years, depicting everything from a young Gaddafi surrounded by the politicians he did business with for years (who would later turn their backs on him), to images of his death, when he lay bleeding and knocked to the ground just like the architecture that embodied his ideals. The publication includes a conversation between Giovanna Silva and Gaddafi biographer Angelo Del Boca, who knew, inside out, just who the real Gaddafi was.

DADALENIN reconstructs and speculates about how Dada and Lenin had more in common than is usually assumed. The book points to some of the tragicomic aspects of their parallel and overlapping artistic and political histories in order to question the unfulfilled legacy of the avant-garde.

In Rainer Ganahl’s voluminous series of works DADA and Lenin are abundant sources of historical imagination. To dive into the historical situation Ganahl uses a variety of artistic media and techniques––ranging from animation movies to theatre performances, from ink drawings to bronze sculptures, departing from a number of historical details and catch phrases, from the no-man’s land between porn, terror and the history of the avant-gardes.

Co-editor Johan F. Hartle’s text situates DADALENIN in the development of Rainer Ganahl’s work and reconstructs it in the context of current debates on the artistic and political avant-garde. DADALENIN thus appears as a reflection of numerous key motifs of contemporary cultural theory, indirectly haunting us in all kinds of monstrous alliances.

Edited by Rainer Ganahl and Johan F. Hartle
With contributions by Boris Groys and Jenny Borland

In Kerala, a term exists for people like my parents, bandied by neighbours and relatives – Gulf return. Always used in the singular, it is a term associated with privilege, a term for the once-insider who will die an outsider. It accentuates the success story, pretending to know and define those who, out of desperation, adventure or marriage, left their homes to seek work, and now return to expected social glory and envy.—Deepak Unnikrishnan, “Gulf Return,” Himal (December 2010)

A few months ago, we found ourselves sitting in a blush-walled room in the grey area between Mattancherry and Fort Kochi, Kerala. We were in a Gulf Return house on a Gulf Return street, in a town built with Gulf Return money. Just a short ferry ride away was a Dubai Ports World terminal; right on our doorstep, at the nearby Kunnumpuram Junction, was a UAE Xchange outpost, and an ice cream parlour selling Sharjah Shakes. We had left Dubai, with the intention of producing this issue looking at it from across the Arabian Sea, but everywhere we looked, Dubai was all around us.

Can you ever leave Dubai?

In the last year, we’ve produced THE STATE from Madagascar, Portugal, the US, India, and the UAE. Thus far, we’ve been thinking of this publication as placeless, rooted only in the nebulous printernet. Turns out we’ve been trying to figure out Dubai—this strange, wonderful, occasionally traumatic place we grew up in—all along. (Jury’s still out on whether that trauma was due to Dubai, or just the turbulence of adolescence.) The thing is, we are the children of Gulf Returnees ourselves. We didn’t leave our home countries to come here; Dubai’s the only home we’ve ever known. Yet most narratives of Dubai focus on its extremes—solar-sintered skyscrapers made from sun, sand and glass or the unknown labourers that built them; unbridled admiration for its visionary transformation or vitriolic, xenophobic schadenfreude; searing desert heat or lush, landscaped golf courses. As residents-but-not-citizens, we’re paradoxically privileged, yet invisible; our stories remain as yet untold.

Our first questions linger. How do you speak a place, or from a place? Can cultural production have terroir? What does it mean to be a publication from Dubai that has thus far evaded ever actually addressing its positionality head on? Consider this a first attempt.

The State Vol III: The Social Olfactory. Rahel Aima, Ahmad Makia (Eds.). The State.

THE STATE is a publishing practice based out of Dubai, U.A.E. It investigates South-South reorientations, alternative futurisms, transgressive cultural criticism, the transition from analogue to digital, and the sensuous architecture of this “printernet.”

FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE:

Khairani Barokka—Can the Subaltern Smell: The Olfactory Other
Transnational olfactory stereotypes in Indonesia, India, South Africa, and the USA

Ali Boggs—The Corpse
A dead girl in Madagascar, an old pastis-soaked Belgian, and the loose skin of overripe peaches

Suzanne Fischer—Smell H-I-S-T-O-R-Y: A Guided Tour of the Smell Exhibition
In the coming age of olfactory archaeology, a speculative tour of the museum of tomorrow

Adam Flynn—Under the Iron Snout: a First Take on Olfactory Imperialism
Drug-sniffing dogs, fermented fish and mosquito repellent in Vietnam, the Stasi’s smell archives, People Sniffing, and strategies to survive smellveillance

Mary-Jo Gillian—Heap
A residency in a rural Irish landfill, the filamentine heat of rotting matter, the intimacy of olfactory community

Pavel Godfrey—Sensation, Memory, and Place in Delray, Detroit
Post-industrial detritus in Little Budapest, a carbonaceous cocktail of respiratory illnesses and mnemocide, exploding the neoliberal myth of recycling

Barbara Herman—An Ode To Bodies: Peau d’Espagne
The gendering of leather perfumes, and the hidden, abject animal body at its origin